A Good and a bad thing. The ice cubes in ice pack machine will last only for 4 to 5 hours. Every 5 hours you need to drain the water and refill it with ice cubes again and only then it can produce the required coolness. I am buying 2 icecube bags of 10 lbs from publix and it's good for 24 hours.
Good - I had a sound sleep for about 7 hours. 4 hours + 3 hours
Bad - All icecubes melted after the first round of sleep and I woke up at around 2.30 AM to pee and came back to bed. I didn't want to disturb my wife for the refill. Oh boy that's a mistake. After the second round of sleep I woke up with heavy tightness from knee to toe and I can't even slightly bend my knee or ankle at all. I immediately asked my wife to refill the icecubes and kept the pads for about 15 mins then the tighness came down.
Starting Bilateral Tibial Surgery With Dr. Paley - Dec-02-2021
How much do you plan on doing with your tibias?
Oh, I didn't realize this was quadrilateral.
I am new to posting on this site so I don't know how to edit the subject. I was asking for help and since nobody responded I just left it like that. Even I tried few options but no luck.
I updated that info on motoboarder's diary as him and I had the tibia surgery on the same day and going to have the femurs done on the same day as well.
Well, I envy you. I wish I could afford to do 15 cm with Dr. Paley.
Quote from: ReadRothbard on January 24, 2022, 06:47:36 PMWell, I envy you. I wish I could afford to do 15 cm with Dr. Paley.
It took me 6 years to save up this money brother. Of course I could have done it 2 years ago but I would have done only femurs at that point. I wanted to do both segments with safe limits so that the recovery would be faster. Just didn't want to lengthen only one segment too much. Considering my starting height is only 5'2" I wanted to gain 4 inches for sure so waited for few more years to save up the money. I was able to stay focused on my dream mainly with the help of this forum and the old one.
Tomorrow is a big and busy day for me. I have an appointment with Nuvasive team to get my lengthening device and I would officially start my tibial lengthening tomorrow. Also at 4 PM my first out-patient PT session. Hope everything goes well tomorrow.
Surgery Day - 18-Jan-2022 - Part 2:
Once I was moved to the room the nurse came and introduced herself to me. I was half sleepy and after 6 PM I slowly started to feel the pain. One nurse to check your vitals like every 3 to 4 hours and another one to give you the medications as needed. They checked my vitals around 7 PM and by that time I would say my pain level is around 3 to 4. After 8 PM the pain level I had was around 8 and they gave me oxycodone. That's it from there till morning 7 AM I was in the severe pain ranging from 8 to 10 all the time. I got fever and lots of chills through out the night. I keep calling them every 2 hours as other LL veterans mentioned in their diaries. After midnight I had to call them every 90 mins. The cycle was like this, started with oxy, 2 hours after 2 tylenol, 2 hours after morphine, and some valium in between for muscle spasms however I don't remember the exact details. All I can is I was in a lot of pain and kept calling them and told the nurse I am having so much of pain and he checked the system and there are notes for different pain levels that the doctors have recommended for me and he referred to that and said I can give you this and that and I said please I can take anything that helps reduce the pain. Some part of the nights there were very acute and sharp pains I would say 10/10 which lasted for about 10 mins. Somehow I survived the night and I kept saying to myself every single second that everything is going to be alright in the morning and just live through the pain.
When we read the diaries we all will come to an understanding to ourselves that ok the pain is going to be like this much or something of that sort but do a 2x to 3x to your understanding because the pain will be worse more than your imagination if the pain killers don't work for you. In my case, the pain killers did not alleviate much pain for me. But yes the only way to conquer the pain is to go through the pain.
Day 2 - Jan-19-2022
Dr Robbins stopped by around 7.30 AM and asked me hey sleepy head how are you doing? LOL. I said I am in lot of pain and he replied I know, I know...He asked me do you remember I was talking to you after the surgery in the operation theatre? I didn't remember anything and I said no. He checked my feet and asked me to push his hands and he was touching different parts of the feet and asking if I could feel and I was able to. He started explaining everything went well but there are 2 fingers in your left foot that are dropping. It may take few days/weeks/months to come back to its original state. The thumb and 4th finger from the thumb are dropping on my left foot. I don't have any issues on my right foot. If I try to pull my toe towards my body all 5 fingers on my right are pointing towards my body. But on my left the 2nd, 3rd, and 5th fingers are pointing towards my body but the 1st (thumb) and 4 th fingers are dropping towards ground. I asked him should I be worried about this and is this a complication? He said no it is not a complication and usually with the constant PT it will wake up and regain its senses. Hope that's the case. Fingers crossed. He asked me any other questions and left.
Nurse stopped by after Dr.Robbins left and asked me how was your sleep? I said I could not sleep even for a single second bcoz of lot of pain. She said I will see if I can change your pain med a little bit and if that helps. Along with Tylenol, valium, and morphine she added the tonadol also and it helped me a bit. Again I am not too sure about all these medicines they talk too fast with drug names and I was very drowsy/sleepy and it was hard for me to follow her. I asked her could you please write the names in a paper and share it with me. She wrote Tylenol, Valium, Tonadol, Protonix, and Miralax. The protonix is for avoid acidity or acid formation and miralax is a laxative (Stool softner) and along with that an antibiotic in the IV.
I took the advice from one of the LLVeterans (his own personal experience) from his diary that I don't want to go to number 2 for 3 days so for the first 3 days I ate very less since all the energy you need you are getting from IV. Also told the nurse no laxatives for me. It worked out very well for me. First 3 days no bowel movement. However, the night of the surgery day (Jan-18-2022) I was literally died to pee. My bladder was really full and I was in lot of pain they gave me a bottle and I kept on trying and nothing comes out. When I tried to push I felt the pain from the bladder and also felt like all the incision sites were ripping apart. I asked the nurse if you could take me to bathroom he said you can't walk until your PT is done the next day but he said you can try to sit and come to the edge of the bed and try from that position (I was anyways going to do that and he suggested the same). It took me a lot of time to come to the edge of the bed and used the support of the dining table and finally pee-ed. After that every 1 to 2 hours I was able to pee from the bed itself.
In the afternoon the in-patient PT guys came (Pam and Noor). They taught me the necessary exercises that I need to do 3 times a day while I am on the bed. There was no walker on that so we didn't do the walking practice. Following are the exercises,
Ankle pumps - 20x - both legs together
Quad sets - 20x - both legs together
Glute sets (butt squeeze) - 20x
Leg lifts - 10x on each leg leg
Knee bends - 10x on each leg
Leg out + in - 10x on each leg
Leg kicks from the edge of the bed - 10x on each leg.
They also set me the Polar Beach ice pack machine and once I started using that I could feel less swelling pain.
After these workouts took pain killers and slept for about 2 hours in the evening.
Again in the night the pain started to shooting up. Constantly 6 and above but not more than 8. Better than the first night after the surgery.
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